


signs and symbols

by venndaai



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, I KNOW THIS IS CORNY AS HECK, Other, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7217716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I knew Seivarden's hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	signs and symbols

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on tumblr: http://gemofsphene.tumblr.com/post/144325415795/i-wrote-dumb-soulmate-mark-au-fic-because-i-am

 

 

While I brought Seivarden in out of the snow, it was easiest to think of her only as one more problem to be solved, even if I didn’t quite understand why I had to be the one to solve it. But once I’d brought her indoors, purchased supplies, and set the bread to dissolve in a bowl, there was nothing to do but watch the correctives harden on her face and finally acknowledge the physical existence of her, naked and cold and impossibly alive.

I found myself reaching out to turn her wrists so that I could see the bare palms of her ungloved hands. An unforgivable breach of propriety, if I were Radchaai, but I wasn’t, I was equipment, and I’d seen and touched her bare hands before, when she was my lieutenant and I was responsible for her basic needs. But these were not the same hands I remembered. They were more bony and dirtier and had calluses and the marks of past burns and cuts, but what I noticed most immediately was the complete lack of patterning. I remembered Seivarden’s hands- not as clearly as I once could have, but I could easily fill in the gaps in my memory, complete the mental picture: the curls and scallops of the Vendaai house crest, the religious symbols that when placed in the correct order indicated Seivarden’s personal name, and the additional shapes and lines indicating those concepts, loyalties and religious devotions most important to her. No patronage or clientage marks, of course, and more unusual, no signs of any intense personal connections; nothing to tie her to friends, lovers or mentors. I had seen those patterns almost every day for the better part of fifteen years, and in all that time they had hardly shifted or changed at all.

Now they were gone, and for a moment I doubted that this person was really Seivarden Vendaai at all. She might be a Vendaai descendant, or just a stranger with a close resemblance, or perhaps I was truly going mad and seeing a dead face on a random body in the snow.

But she sighed and shifted and I was sure it was Seivarden. Ships know our own officers. Even after a thousand years, we know them.

 

* * *

 

I asked her about her hands later, in Strigan’s house. I expected her to be deeply offended. Instead she just blinked and sighed and said, “Oh, yes. They were half faded when I woke up in the pod. In a year they were almost all gone.” She stared at her hands. “I can still see some of the lines, if I look closely, but they’re very faint.”

After I translated, Strigan said, “Interesting.” Her anger had receded, and she observed Seivarden now as though watching an ugly but scientifically valuable menagerie animal.

Seivarden shifted, and seemed to wake up a little. Something occurred to her, and for the first time, she glanced at my own bare hands. She’d avoided looking at them before, probably not even consciously aware that she was doing so. Now she appeared interested.

I uncurled my fingers and laid my hands flat against my thighs, palms out so Seivarden could see that there was nothing but unbroken brown skin.

There had been marks once, though not on my hands. Almost all humans develop such marks at some points in their lives, but in uncivilized societies, they generally aren’t limited to areas politely covered by gloves. I knew what this body's soul marks had looked like, where they had been located on its back and face and feet. I knew the ways in which they had told its owner who she was and where she belonged. They had been removed during the process of preparing the body for ancillary attachment. No lewdly barbaric markings that officers would have had to look at. Nothing that might make them remember that their servants had once been prisoners of war.

“Hah,” Seivarden said. I guessed she’d probably used my blank hands as more evidence that I was a barely-human provincial. Which was ironic, given that hers were as blank as mine, though this was less obvious as her skin was significantly darker. A casual Radchaai observer might just assume that she had dark markings. If she were lucky. Of course, in the Radch her hands would never be visible to other people, at least to those who weren’t personal servants. But the doctors she’d been sent to would have seen them. Reeducators certainly would have.

I was beginning to understand why she’d left Radch space. I wasn't much inclined to feel any sympathy. But I understood, and a small part of my single brain kept thinking about it for a while after.

Radchaai custom and superstition placed a very high value on soul markings as divine directives. A sign that Amaat was personally involved in each citizen's life, guiding them. That they were not abandoned and alone. Seivarden was both. 

What did that make me? It had never before occurred to me to wonder.

 

* * *

 

 In the medical center by the bridge, I lay in bed, covered in correctives, and Seivarden sat next to me, rubbing her hands together nervously, pressing her thumbs into the creases in her palms as though trying to ease some kind of ache.

 

* * *

 

 About two-thirds of the way through our journey to Omaugh Palace, she began to keep her hands in loose fists when she wasn’t using her fingers, and to tuck them under her arms when she was standing or sitting still. I assumed this was because we had begun to run across the occasional Radchaai citizen, and she was embarrassed by her glovelessness. I decided not to bring the topic up.

 

* * *

 

 In Mercy of Kalr’s medical bay, I stood by her bed and said, “This is all wrong. We should trade places.”

“Breq,” she said, drugged and lethargic. “I fucked up.”

“You certainly did.” I looked at her, closer than I had looked in a while. She looked smaller than usual against all that white, wearing only a thin white medical gown and a pair of cheap white gloves that Medic had provided her with. I blinked. “That’s new.”

She looked down, eyes slowly focusing on the line where white glove transitioned to dark skin, and to the ink-black tracery of lines going up her wrist like snaking vines. She let out a breath, and shoved the hand under the sheet.

“It’s fine,” I said, making a placatory gesture. “I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about Lieutenant Ekalu.”

She stared at me then, mouth slightly open, for almost a quarter of a minute, and finally said, “Aatr’s tits, Breq, you can be a real idiot sometimes.”

I made another gesture, and changed the topic. It wasn’t worth engaging in an argument just because I’d somehow offended Seivarden’s delicate sensibilities.

 

* * *

 

 “It started small,” Seivarden said, a few days later, sitting beside me on the small bed in my quarters, gingerly peeling off her gloves one finger at a time. “Just in the center of my palms. It hurt. Sometimes a lot. Like I was growing new bones.”

She held out her hands.

It wasn’t like any pattern I’d seen before. The lines were wild and riotous, a jungle of twists and crosses, sometimes scratching livid red across her fingers and knuckles, and twisted up in bundles of lines, small clusters of shapes and letters- I made out a sequence I could easily translate as Mercy of Kalr, another that combined Amaat with the triple crossed swords that indicated the military, but all leading back to the center, to the stylized symbol of Toren, the scales of Justice, bound up with the symbol of Esk, the sign of beginnings. The same motif, in the very center of both her palms. For Radchaai, the meaning was inescapable.

I watched the patterns turn, slowly, moving just under her skin, the chaos seeming to sort itself into order through that simple rotation, like the orbit of a station around a moon, or one person around another.

Ship must have been carefully hiding her hands from me, respectful of her privacy. Who else had seen them? Ekalu, no doubt. Medic, certainly. I remembered my breakfast with her. “I don’t know how reeducators do it,” she’d said. “See so deeply into someone and look them in the face afterward.”

I said, “I didn’t realize.”

She laughed a little. “I’d figured that out.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable. I just thought it would be better to show you before, well, before we went any further with- whatever this is.”

No personal housename on her hands, part of me noted, no personal devotions to gods or concepts (justice, propriety, benefit, the arc of the universe, the perfect eye of God), just other people, and their opinions of her, and her love for them- part of me noted this. The larger part was occupied with thoughts more relevant to our immediate situation.

I reached, and caught her wrists. She stilled at once, staring at me. I placed my thumbs lightly on the inside of her wrists, and stroked down. She sucked in a breath. I stopped, each of my thumbs resting at the center of each palm, between the creases, right over the designs that represented my name and my place in Seivarden’s life.

“Hmm,” I said. And then- “Augh,” as a sudden cramp shot pain up my regrowing leg. I dropped her hands, and winced.

Seivarden’s tension shifted instantly into concern. “Your leg? Can I see?”

I was wearing only my long undershirt. I considered simply lifting it, then decided to remove it completely. We were already in bed, without gloves. By the rules of Radch propriety, I was basically naked already.

She pressed her bare fingers to my knee, and began massaging the tightly wound muscles above and below it. I forced myself to relax and breathe slowly.

“You’re still walking too much,” Seivarden told me, frowning, and then her expression shifted, in the particular way I was coming to recognize as a reaction to Ship asking to use her voice.

“Fleet Captain,” Ship said, through Seivarden, “can you turn around?”

I blinked. Seivarden gave a half shrug, looking as mystified as I felt. I used my hands to bend my stiffened knee and swing that leg around, bringing the other next to it, so that I was facing towards the wall, my back to Seivarden.

“Oh,” Seivarden said.

Ship reached out to me, showed me what Seivarden was seeing. My back, brown, muscular, skin occasionally broken by moles or other blemishes.

And under the skin, climbing up my spine like the trunk of a skeletal tree, a faintly shimmering line of white, more akin to a tattoo than a scar. Lines branched from that main trunk, splitting again and again into delicate vein-like traceries. And collecting into fruit, like lungs, hanging from my spine. The shapes unmistakable. The scales of Justice.

The balance of the universe.

As I watched- as Ship and Seivarden watched- a new branch split from the tree and began to grow.

“It wasn’t there yesterday,” Ship said, in our ears this time.

It hadn't hurt. I hadn't felt it at all. What was the significance of that?

Seivarden said, reverentially, “It’s beautiful.” Her fingers brushed my back, and I shivered.

I said, “I don’t know what it means.” It was such a particularly Radchaai concept. I'd been so sure I wasn't Radchaai, despite being made and molded by them in the most brutally intimate ways. And there was no sign of Toren, so representation of Esk. No elm leaves for a house of bakers. Just those scales, hanging on my back. Weighing me down? Or giving me wings? What stupidly sentimental thoughts.

“I do,” Seivarden said cheerfully. “It means you’re a person who has soul marks. Now you’ll have to worry about them like the rest of us.”

Ship said, “It looks to me like it has a lot more growing to do.”

Seivarden said, “Well, that’s something to look forward to. I just hope you don’t grow patterns on your face like a barbarian. It would make diplomatic functions a bit more awkward.”

She loved me, there was no way for me to ignore it. I knew she wanted- longed for her name to appear on my skin. I also knew that she would never tell me so, and that she would love me the same if that never happened. Unconditionally. A terrifying word. But all it really meant was that she just wanted to see what the pattern would look like when it was done.

So did I.

 

 


End file.
